Posted on 11/02/2001 11:59:31 AM PST by Starmaker
-- 'In moral philosophy, at some level, the ends are used to justify the means. The end - the good of society - does justify the means - our moral code."
Hmmmm - an arguable 'moral code' can be jusified by claiming that it's use will be for the good of society.
- Yep, as you commented, OBL justifies his terrorist attacks as being for the good of islamic society.
Our boy likes sick 'jokes' if he classes this as a valid philosophy.
Sorry andy, forgot to flag you.
Yawn.
If those abortion deaths were committed BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT (e.g., as is done in China all too often), then you might have a point for your "collective guilt of the US" whine.
Instead, they have been done by the personal decisions of individual Americans. Whatever your views on abortion, surely even you can see the difference between that and a state-sponsored action.
Your "point" is as specious as holding the United States, as a country, to blame for the tens of thousands of homicides that occur every year. They, too, are the result of individual action, and not national action.
This is nonsense.
Motive very often determines whether a killing is murder, or is not.
You add nothing to discussion by emptily declaring, "murder is murder", because whether a killing is murder at all rests entirely on the situation, and motive is a large part of the situation.
Two men are having a fight in the alley. One shoots the other. Is it murder? You can't know without knowing the reason for the shot, can you?
But this is beside the point -- you were needlessly nitpicking the person's wording. Their point was not that the intent of the terrorist was what made it murder (what made it murder was the fact that the targets were innocents), the comment about the intent of the terrorists was only meant to highlight the senselessness and barbarity of the act.
And I'm not surprised to find you there!
--- How dumb can ol stinkhole get? - He admits to being in a stinking gutter.
x: This article is crap because A, B, C.
y: Your definition of crap is incorrect.
x: Semantics. I return your attention to A, B, C.
y: But you have failed to establish that your crap doesn't stink.
Please: NO profanity, NO personal attacks, NO racism or violence in posts. This really applies to everyone. What part of this don't you understand?
The author's scheme is:
A. Is there any distinction between our actions in Afghanistan and the terrorists actions against us?
B. It is too hard to think of any. I can't and any you can think of are not any good because I say so ahead of time.
C.Blaaah. Blaaah. Blaaah - Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, ..... [virtually none of which are relevant to the demonstration of the premise contained in question A>
D. Therefore I (the author am right and you are wrong).
My contention is that this is a classic intellectual swindle, which apparently you also have fallen for.
Opposing thumbs?
Question: are my actions:
1. Murder in the first degree
2. Homicide or manslaughter
3. Self-defense
Bonus question: what is the difference between my actions and those of the US government when it bombs Afghani peasants?
This is another example of this author's intellectual swindle - that you fell for.LOL. I agree with the author, you disagree with the author. I say so in English, while you, unable to simply disagree, go through this big "logic" charade, and try to convince us that you're an intellectual. You're a joke.
Little do you know how little you know.
AndrewJackson is right on the money.
What you fail to understand is that his post is not based on the fact that he "disagrees" with the author. It's based on the fact that the author fails to logically support his own conclusion.
You are clearly extremely unfamiliar with the rigorous meaning of the word "logic" (as opposed to its more fuzzy popular definition of "seems reasonable to me").
log-ic (loj'ik) n.There is an objective, quantifiable difference between a logical argument (in the sense of deductive reasoning) and mere rhetoric. The essay that started this thread was full of the latter and very little of the former. It's the difference between what lawyers do and what mathematicians do. One is designed to be persuasive propaganda, the other is designed to actually prove a conclusion.
1. the science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference.
2. SYMBOLIC LOGIC.
And it has nothing to do with whether you "agree" with the conclusion or not. If someone said, "Circles are round, 8 is larger than 6, therefore 1+1=2", people could "agree" with its claims, but it would still be an utter failure of logic -- the conclusion, whether true or not, did not actually logically follow from the "evidence" given to support it. It would be a ludicrous thing to offer as a mathematical proof (math proofs are just a special type of logical argument).
An argument is either logically valid or it is not. That is, it either supports its claims and uses them to climb a ladder where each rung is a necessary consequence of what came before, leading to a firm conclusion, or it is merely an exercise in mouthing a free-floating opinion.
AJ correctly points out several places where the article attempts to pretend to be logically arguing something (i.e. giving the reader the impression that it is making a logical case for something), when in fact the author is pulling a shell game, a sleight of hand, wherein the desired conclusion was pulled out of his back pocket by his right hand while his left hand was distracting their attention with something else.
There is a name for these types of charades masquerading as actual logic, and that name is "fallacy". A fallacy is a rhetorical device that looks at first glance as if it is making an unarguable point of logic, but in fact doesn't prove anything at all.
Two classic examples are the argument from authority, and the argument ad hominem. Argument from authority is of the form, "so-and-so says so, and he's the top guy in field X". This is a fallacy because even though it can sometimes be persuasive, the fact that so-and-so says so doesn't actually *prove* squat -- the guy might be mistaken. In a logical discussion you can't substitute a simple declaration for an actual demonstration that the point is a valid one.
Argument ad hominem is the flip side -- arguing that a point must be false because the source is allegedly an idiot, or unsavory, or a commie, or whatever. Again, this can be persuasive (we should always double-check the pronouncements of idiots et al), but it's not a valid logical disproof -- insulting the source in no way actually demonstrates the falsity of the information, it just *pretends* to.
There are dozens of types of logical fallacies, many of them far more subtle than the above. But they all boil down to, "you sound like you're saying something persuasive, but the form of your presentation is actually insufficient to logically prove the point you are trying to make -- you're making a logical leap without building an actual bridge over the gap first." It's the difference between making an argument that is actually sound, and one that merely sounds good.
Pointing out logical holes in an argument, as AJ has done quite well, isn't a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with it, or even disproving the conclusion -- it's a matter of pointing out the places where the author has dishonestly jumped from one point to another without actually filling in the gaps between them. "There are holes in that argument" is a common phrase, the meaning of which is to point out that the author has attempted to go from A to E without showing that B, C, and D are present and accounted for.
Logicians can dismantle a flawed argument without any personal opinion on the matter being argued. All that is necessary is to check whether the author has logically supported each of his points in a non-fallacious manner, or whether he has simply pulled them out of a hat after waving his hands about for a few minutes.
The difference between a logical argument and a fallacious one is like the difference between night and day, like the difference between a valid mathematical proof and a flawed one. The principles are actually pretty simple and straightforward.
The problem is that many people haven't the slightest training in the science of logic (it's a branch of mathematics), and thus wouldn't recognize it if it bit them in the ass. AJ rightly points out several gaping holes in the author's attempt to work from point A to point E in his argument (i.e., he correctly points out failures of logic in the piece), only to be blasted by several people who don't even grasp the nature of what he has done.
"That's just your opinion", they snarl, as irrelevantly and incorrectly as if they had denounced as "opinion" a math professor's refusal to accept their flawed geometry proofs.
A given argument can be far more than just a strident statement of the author's beliefs. It can be an edifice built as firmly and sturdily as a suspension bridge, it can be a walkway so solidly constructed that any man can walk its length and test the strength of every paving stone and find it good. Unfortunately, because of a widespread lack of training in the straightforward field of logic, there are many who can neither think nor argue logically, nor properly analyze the arguments of another.
The author's conclusions may or may not be correct, but the point is that he has failed to actually make a solid case for them, he has simply pretended to. Maybe you like what he has to say, but don't mistake that for the proposition that he has actually proven his position.
Oh, cool -- so I take it you've already hit the Abuse button on Rowdee and Tex-oma?
Are you really this naive?
1. We are not "bombing Afghani peasants". Not on purpose, anyway, although mistakes are sometimes made, and our actual targets sometimes position themselves among the "peasants". We are not "firing at random" as in your specious example. Strike one.
2. We are bombing the Taliban. They are not merely bystanders in a "crowded room", as in your specious example. Strike two. They have actively supported, protected, and aided Al Qaeda. In many respects, they are the same organization.
3. Worse, the Taliban are the rulers of Afghanistan. They are the government and police of that country. They are the ones who are (or at least should be) responsible for apprehending and extraditing the mass murderers in their midst. Instead, they have flatly refused to apprehend him, and have aided and abbetted him. We gave them several weeks to straighten up and fulfill their duties as a civilized government. They refused. We had no choice but to treat them as part of the same gang of murderers as those whom they shield -- because they are. This is vastly different than your specious example of holding a random room of people hostage and randomly shooting them in search of a killer.
Strike three, you're out. Way, way, WAY out.
If you want a better analogy than your incredibly laughable "shoot up a crowded room at random" example, consider any of several Western movies set back in the days before there was an effective state or federal level law enforcement presence in the frontier, and one town's rogue sheriff was actually a member of the gang of thugs that terrorized the town's population, and the surrounding territories. The sheriff of a nearby victimized town gathers a posse of concerned citizens and goes to the offending town, telling the sheriff that he needs to arrest the gang. He refuses, and actually interferes with their apprehension. There's nothing left to do but abjectly surrender to the lawless, or have a shoot-out of the good guys versus the bad guys.
And anyone who asked, "What separates the posse from the gang of murdering thugs" would be a f***ing idiot.
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